Brothers

Like many rock stars that came of age in the 1970s, brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen were heavily influenced by the music of the British Invasion of the early 1960s, specifically the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five. Once Eddie’s gift as a guitarist and Alex’s as a drummer emerged, their primary influences became British bands of the later 1960s—namely Cream and Led Zeppelin. Both featured virtuoso guitarists and powerhouse drummers: Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker for Cream, and Jimmy Page and John Bonham for Led Zeppelin. Although David Lee Roth’s earliest musical influences ranged from Al Jolson to James Brown, once he became the lead singer for Mammoth/Van Halen in 1973, he also brought in an aesthetic influence to complement the Van Halen brothers’ musical prowess, drawing inspiration from British rock star David Bowie and his flamboyant stage persona of Ziggy Stardust.

In the mid-1970s, the band’s success seemed at odds with their historical moment. At first, “hard rock had been out of fashion when we started out in the clubs” (175) because it was the era of singer-songwriters such as James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, and Linda Ronstadt. Then, after Van Halen turned out multiple smash records, becoming a household name in the early 1980s, popular music otherwise swung toward “plastic pop” (176): bands such as the Cars, Devo, and the Go-Gos. Van Halen clearly did not “fit in with any of this, or anything else that was happening at the time—not disco, not punk, not folk, not funk” (176).

Without knowing it, Van Halen created new subgenres of rock, which exploded in popularity after the creation of MTV (the Music Television channel) in the 1980s: “as the eighties picked up speed, glam rock and heavy metal were heaving their way into the top 40, invading the mainstream, and whether we liked it or not, a lot of the bands that were hot in Hollywood had been influenced by Van Halen” (177). Heavy metal and “hair metal” bands of the later 1980s were clearly attempting to look like Roth and sound like the Van Halen brothers. Alex Van Halen is adamant that Van Halen was not a heavy metal band, and is dismissive of these imitators’ chops: “those bands were not up to our standards musically. For us, hair and makeup, crazy clothes, and a great show with things bursting into flames, that was all just icing on the cake. For most of the eighties hair metal bands, that stuff was the entire piece of pastry” (178).